Peterned

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Beehive II will not be finished, It is officially dead. Websites that offer complex scripts with hundres upon hundreds of lines of code for things that can also be done with proper html, a bit of css, and three lines of dom script, are relics of an age gone by - And rightfully so. Although Beehive II is DOM based it still represents the concept of 1 wrapper around different document object models, and I have come to believe that the best a wrapper could possibly achieve is to be merely equal to the implementation(s) it represents; Even if it were perfect, it would never be better than the original thing.

One of beehive's purposes was to make animating things easy, and I do believe it did a nice job at that. However - as far as animation is concerned - flash is often a way better solution to make things move about, even though my personal (very biassed) preference might disagree with that. Every problem has a preferred solution; One that is not based on personal opinion, but on simple facts. Dhtml will do for simple animations, but for that a dhtml library is overkill.

So what should dhtml do today? The same it always did (aside from the cheesy crap) and more - thanks to things like xmlHttp - just as long as you let html, css and domscript do what they're intended to do, and not script everything. ;)

The csshover behavior has been updated with 2 bugfixes. Apparently it was still required to add nodenames in css selectors for IE5.x, and there was a security error when stylesheets were included from another domain.

Also, a couple of weeks ago I made my version of a small and simple click game, like the ones often found on PDAs and pretty much everywhere else. It's been added to the other games.

Over the last couple of weeks I've been working on another article for Naar Voren, the Dutch (sorry) online magazine about web development. The article suggests a way to separate markup and behavior for links that should behave in various fancy ways, while at the same time keeping things accessible at all times for clients that don't support it.

In a couple of weeks from now I will add an English translation here, with examples.

As you can see, the new design is finally done. And it's about time, considering I started out somewhere in december 2003. A lot of things are still the same; The examples and games are still there, and one game has been added; a 5K version of pacman (again), created for the '04 Gathering of Tweakers 5K contest.

Other things have changed. Beehive 1 is no longer available for download, because its concept is basically outdated. A new section has been added to the site, markup, which will come to contain demos of things that can be done with CSS, often combined a bit of script. At the moment there's not really anything to see there (except for whatever:hover), but that's bound to change.

Beehive II is pretty much done. The beta version is available for download, and a beta 2 is on the way. Shortly after that the final version will be available.

As a bonus, the previous 2 designs of this site have been added as alternate stylesheets. The styles menu to the right enables you to choose one of the (currently) 3 designs. Your choice will be remembered in a cookie.

A couple of weeks/months ago I started working on a behavior (IE only .htc) to make
IE support more css. The intention was (and still is) to support various properties
that don't work, like min-height. The first stable and usable behavior enables :hover
on any element, which turned out to be reasonably easy to get done.